Just an extract here, though, to show just one object that plays its material role in Salinger's stories:

The smoking in Salinger is well worth tracking. There is nothing idle
or random about the cigarettes and cigars that appear in his stories,
or with the characters’ dealings with them. In “Raise High the
Roof-Beam, Carpenters,” Salinger achieves a brilliant effect with the
lighting of a cigar that has been held unlit by a small old deaf-mute
man during the first ninety pages of the story; and in “Zooey” another
cigar is instrumental in the dawning of a recognition. The cigarettes
that the mother and son smoke in the bathroom play less noticeable but no less noteworthy roles in the progress of the story.Like
the food in “Franny,” the cigarettes in “Zooey” enact a kind of
parallel plot. Cigarettes offer the writer (or used to offer) a great
range of metaphoric possibilities. They have lives and deaths. They glow
and they turn to ashes. They need attention. They create smoke. They
make a mess. As we listen to Bessie Glass and Zooey talk, we follow the
fortunes of their cigarettes. Some of them go out for lack of attention.
Others threaten to burn the smoker’s fingers. Our sense of the mother
and son’s aliveness, and of the life-and-death character of their
discussion, is heightened by the perpetual presence of these inanimate
yet animatable objects.

I like the alternative, 'inanimate yet animatable', as a point at which the material gains some control. But Malcolm leaves open who or what animates the cigarette or cigar: what responsibility must the human take here, and how can it be done without Malcolm falling towards anthropomorphism (which I don't think she means to do here)? (You will find the quote on p.2 of the NYRB essay).

This essay can also be found in a recent edited edition of Malcolm's writing put together by Helen Garner, Forty one false starts, published this year If you ever wanted to get inside the heads of some of the New York School artists, critics and dealers from the 1950s to the present, these essays are a great read.

Wednesday, 20 November 2013

Discovered while soaking newspapers to use to kill off a patch of lawn, a short review of an exhibition of work by Sarah crowEST, Tumbleweed Methodology, at Craft (Flinders Lane, Melbourne), finishing 30 November for anyone who may be in the big smoke to the north. It reads in part:

Materiality is a key motif among Sarah crowEST's latest body of work, which rambles its way throughout one of Craft's three exhibition spaces. Her paintings and various forms don't so much utilise Belgian linen as a surface on which to paint, but a material through which to play and experiment... (The Age, 9 November 2013, Life&Style 5)

A collection of 'material' reviews could now seriously impact the space in a filing cabinet. From barely a nod two years ago, the 'm word' is now the buzz word for art of any medium and across all media. Has it lost its meaning? Or does it just mean different things to different people? (I think that is where we started, sometime in May ...).